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Suzanne has been teaching and coaching others about integrated mind-body approaches to personal and group performance and integrated well-being for over two decades. She has successfully employed proactive holistic wellness awareness tools and techniques to help individuals and teams strengthen attention and focus, shape positive and productive thoughts, choices, actions and behaviors, proactively manage stress and conflict internally and externally, and build empathy, compassion and interconnection.
Suzanne's Passion Statement
Suzanne specializes in teaching others to honestly and fearlessly address their shadow thoughts, choices, actions and behaviors, and owning the importance of the impact they have upon all they come into contact with as well as themselves, and how they can actualize lasting, authentic, transparent change in their lives.
Mind-Body Well Being
Suzanne has been passionate about healthy, natural approaches to diet and lifestyle since her teenage years. When she was pregnant with her daughter Jessica in 1978, she chose to use the Bradley Method® of relaxed meditative breathing for a drug-free labor and delivery that would allow her to be calm, centered and present. When Jessica entered the world after a five hour labor at 10 pounds one-and-one half ounces, Suzanne knew there was something to what is now referred to as the mind-body connection. Soon afterward while attending college in Michigan, she also became a certified massage therapist and was professionally certified in Polarity Therapy, Touch for Health, reflexology, and Chinese acupressure.
Since the breathing technique she learned to help manage pain and anxiety when giving birth worked so well for her, she taught the same simple process to her massage clients in resort spas and in conjunction with chiropractic professionals - with remarkable results. Suzanne's work with automobile accident patients with severe body trauma found them healing faster than with chiropractic work alone.
After over a decade working primarily with her clients' physical well-being, Suzanne wanted to know more about how the mind and body work together. Because she wanted to work exclusively with people who desired to proactively eliminate disempowering thoughts, choices, actions, habits and behaviors, Suzanne chose to become trained and certified in hypnotherapy in 1990. She went on to receive extensive advanced training in specific hypnosis techniques, guided imagery, NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) and EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique/Meridian Tapping), and earned her diploma in hypnotherapy from the nationally accredited college Hypnosis Motivation Institute located in Los Angeles, California. Suzanne also completed three additional specialized certification programs through HMI as well: Hypnosis for Weight Loss, Hypnosis for Pain Management, and Hypnosis for Sports Performance. She has adapted all three specialized trainings to work in tandem with the foundations of secular mindfulness practice, finding that by merging both hypnosis and mindfulness the subconscious and conscious aspects of the mind are able to work together dynamically to attain greater symmetry and equanimity for positive daily life results.
Proactive Mindfulness
A practitioner of meditation since her high school years, Suzanne became a student of Transcendental Meditation (TM), and Tibetan and Zen Buddhist meditative practices in the 1980s. Bringing the benefits of meditation practice to the general public inspired her to take a course in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, a modern-day application of ancient Buddhist mindfulness techniques developed by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn that is framed specifically around coping with life stressors. After studying, experiencing and teaching both disciplines separately, she realized that hypnosis and mindfulness are extremely compatible modalities that provide similar mind-body benefits, and has been combining both with her students and coaching clients for over twenty years. Although she has deep respect for the Buddhist roots of mindfulness, her approach is entirely secular as she believes her work and teachings must be inclusive, open, and approachable for all people, regardless of his or her spiritual or religious beliefs.
Choosing to purposefully work with people in real life situations and not within academic or clinical settings, she often refers to her approach as "Street Mindfulness" - teaching mindfulness as a Life Skill that can benefit literally every aspect of anyone's day-to-day life, personal as well as professional. She has brought mindfulness practices into every aspect of her personal life and professional work and considers it the framework of everything she does. And although she has taught meditation and mindfulness practices to hundreds of students, she considers herself to be a student as well.
The Written Word
For over eight years Suzanne wrote a monthly column for Atlanta-based Oracle Magazine called "Living Mindfully" that now continues through her blog and podcast of the same name. In 2005, she composed and published a book titled Affirmative Actions: Eyes Open Meditations for Women that is currently under revision. In addition, she is composing a workbook based on her Mindful Communication and Conflict Management coaching and training, as well as book titled Street Mindfulness: Wisdom from the Classroom and Laboratory of Life.
Mindful Communication and Conflict Management
Because she knows that communication is so vital to successful personal and business relationships with others as well as the relationship we have with ourselves, Suzanne became professionally trained in alternative methods of conflict resolution though the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation (ISCT) and non-violent communication through the Center for Non-Violent Communication (CNVC). Her Mindful Communication coaching and training assists clients and students to manage stress and anger in a healthy and proactive manner "from the inside out": to face internal and external conflicts and challenges with poise and grace, become mindfully assertive, more civil, to live with transparency, authenticity and "walk their talk" and live the Golden Rule as best as he or she possibly can. In addition she teaches others how to stop committing violence and sabotage against themselves by helping them to adopt mindful self-care - and to cultivate positive self-talk and self-compassion in tandem with radically honest and courageous inner reflection and self-inquiry.
Mindfulness in the Corporate Environment
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